“Been there, done that” isn’t enough. For Trek fans, this truly is like being there.
Category: Tech
There is a (Christmas) Season (Turn, Turn, Turn)
Another post about a turntable? This one is exclusively at Best Buy. It’s a Pro-Ject Carbon Esprit SB, which is considered to be an excellent table. The list price is normally $600, but this one costs an extra fifty bucks because it’s a Beatles Edition.
A competitor of Pro-Ject, called Rega, had a Queen special limited edition turntable that originally went for the same price, but it was eventually offered at a discount. I’m not in the market for a new turntable myself, having just replaced the broken RCA plugs on my 30-year-old Thorens turntable, but I’ll be interested in seeing how well the Beatles table sells.
Denton Doctors
The finest sounding loudspeaker I have ever owned is the Wharfedale Denton 80th Anniversary Edition. Don’t be put off by the relatively small size of the cabinet and the 5-inch woofer. The cabinet is heavy and solid, with beautiful mahogany wood veneer — not cheap vinyl — on all sides, and bass response from the Kevlar woofer is excellent.
This is a warm, smooth and refined speaker, yet richly detailed and musically dynamic, in the best British mini-monitor tradition. The Denton is not ideal for a surround sound system, but for music it is magnificent, presenting an incredibly deep and wide sense of space. Adding a subwoofer is not only unnecessary, it would be a mistake, in my opinion.
Tonearmenia City in the Sky
What the heck will they think of next? This is a Kickstarter campaign. If it actually goes into production, the proposed cost of the Mag-Lev turntable will be $1500, which is reasonable, considering the novelty level, if nothing else.
A Little of Annie
Thanks to Annie Little’s Facebook page, I’ve been keeping tabs on her career ever since she appeared in the Amazon commercial for the second-generation Kindle. She was on last week’s episode of </scorpion>, playing a museum director and not, thankfully, a murder victim.
Thanks to YouTube, I haven’t had to do much video capturing and editing for a long time. But I needed to do it for this post, and I must say that the process sure is a heck of a lot easier and faster, with much better resulting quality, than it was ten years ago. One quirk, now that video can be embedded directly with HTML5, instead of relying upon a Flash plugin, is that each Web browser has its own style of player.
Look out, Elon Musk!
The European Mars Lander crashed, and now the Martians are coming here before the Space X mission can get there!
